This book offers rich critical perspectives on the marketing of a variety of toys, brands, and product categories. Topics include marketing undertaken by specific children’s toy brands such as American Girl, Barbie, Disney, GoldieBlox, Fisher-Price, and LEGO, and marketing trends characterizing broader toy categories such as on-trend grotesque toys; toy firearms; minimalist toys; toyetics; toys meant to offer diverse representation; STEM toys; and unboxing videos. Toy marketing warrants a sustained scholarly critique because of toys’ cultural significance and their roles in children’s lives, as well as the industry’s economic importance. Discourses surrounding toys—including who certain toys are meant for and what various toys and brands can signify about their owners’ identities—have implications for our understandings of adults’ expectations of children and of broader societal norms into which children are being socialized.

To sort out who's who and what's what in the enchanting, vexing world of Barbies(R) and Ninja Turtles(R), Tinkertoys(R) and teddy bears, is to begin to see what's become of childhood in America. It is this changing world, and what it unveils about our values, that Gary Cross explores in Kids' Stuff, a revealing look into the meaning of American toys through this century. Early in the 1900s toys reflected parents' ideas about children and their futures. Erector sets introduced boys to a realm of business and technology, while baby dolls anticipated motherhood and building blocks honed the fine motor skills of the youngest children. Kids' Stuff chronicles the transformation that occurred as the interests and intentions of parents, children, and the toy industry gradually diverged--starting in the 1930s when toymakers, marketing playthings inspired by popular favorites like Shirley Temple and Buck Rogers, began to appeal directly to the young. TV advertising, blockbuster films like Star Wars(R), and Saturday morning cartoons exploited their youthful audience in new and audacious ways. Meanwhile, powerful social and economic forces were transforming the nature of play in American society. Cross offers a richly textured account of a culture in which erector sets and baby dolls are no longer alone in preparing children for the future, and in which the toys that now crowd the racks are as perplexing for parents as they are beguiling for little boys and girls. Whether we want our children to be high achievers in a competitive world or playful and free from the worries of adult life, the toy store confronts us with many choices. What does the endless array of action figures and fashion dolls mean? Are children--or parents--the dupes of the film, television, and toy industries, with their latest fads and fantasies? What does this say about our time, and what does it bode for our future? Tapping a vein of rich cultural history, Kids' Stuff exposes the serious business behind a century of playthings.

The toy industry is one of the most consistently misunderstood sectors of American business, comprising a wide range of businesses under one banner—entertainment, commodities, fashion, and licensing—that each behave differently. Unlike other industries, more than 40 percent of products are new every year, and success often depends on the whims of a child. Currently about $22 billion per year at wholesale for traditional toys, the United States toy industry has remained relatively constant since the 1990s, with a short-term boom in 2020 and 2021 in response to a global pandemic. This edition has been updated to reflect these and other dynamic changes in recent years, including the impacts of shifts in marketing, technology, consumption, and retailing. It offers an introduction to the structure, practices, and market forces that impact the toy industry, including a short history, a description of the current market landscape, product trends, emerging opportunities and threats and expectations for the future. The primary focus is the U.S. toy industry, but one cannot ignore the global scope of the business, particularly with respect to manufacturing and opportunities for growth in emerging markets. It is intended to provide a foundation for understanding the diverse and dynamic nature of the toy industry and many things that make it unique and to introduce this fast-paced, always changing and fiercely competitive business where success is often more an art than a science.

This timely and innovative book provides a detailed history of marketing to children, revealing the strategies that shape the design of toys and have a powerful impact on the way children play. Stephen Kline looks at the history and development of children's play culture and toys from the teddy bear and Lego to the Barbie doll, Care Bears and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He profiles the rise of children's mass media - books, comics, film and television - and that of the specially stores such as Toys 'R' Us, revealing how the opportunity to reach large audiences of children through television was a pivotal point in developing new approaches to advertising. Contemporary youngsters, he shows, are catapulted into a fantastic and chaotic time-space continuum of action toys thanks to the merchandisers' interest in animated television. Kline looks at the imagery and appeal of the toy commercials and at how they provide a host of stereotyped figures around which children can organize their imaginative experience. He shows how the deregulation of advertising in the United States in the 1980s has led directly to the development of the new marketing strategies which use television series to saturate the market with promotional "character toys". Finally, in a powerful re-examination of the debates about the cultural effects of television, Out of the Garden asks whether we should allow our children's play culture to be primarily defined and created by marketing strategies, pointing to the unintended consequences of a situation in which images of real children have all but been eliminated from narratives about the young.

In this volume, scholars in developmental psychology, education, and neuroscience examine the ways in which children's toys often reflect and promote gender stereotypes, as well as the long-term consequences of gender-typed play.

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2005 in the subject Business economics - Offline Marketing and Online Marketing, grade: 1,0, University of Hull, language: English, abstract: Being a relatively dynamic and one of the biggest of its sort within the European Union, the Toys and Games Industry in the United Kingdom is attractive for many foreign toy manufacturers. Especially the market sector of the traditional toys, which will be defined later, seems to be very auspicious from a general point of view. To what extent this general view corresponds with the reality will be examined on the basis of German toy manufactures and needs to be analysed critically. Hence, the research objective of this work is to figure out what opportunities but also what sorts of threats toy manufacturers from Germany could be faced with when entering the British market. This, however, needs several questions to be answered. Terms like market value, market growth rates but also other factors like the influence of the toy firms’ environment and consumers’ attitude towards the industry must be explained which will be done through a secondary data-based overview of the industry in chapter two. Having introduced to several considered research approaches, the choice of the used methodology, its application and special research highlights in chapter three, the analysis’s findings will be illustrated in the fourth part of this study. These results will be consumer-based in order to get a better overview about the market itself and to being able to give more efficient recommendations to German toy companies considering breaking into the UK market. The final answer of the research objective mentioned above and further recommendations will be content of chapter five. The last chapter of the essay then tries to draw a conclusion and will clarify whether the targeted research objective has been achieved and outline weaknesses within the used methodology and their potential avoidance in future research projects.

There are few scholarly books about toys, and even fewer that consider toys within the context of culture and communication. Toys and Communication is an innovative collection that effectively showcases work by specialists who have sought to examine toys throughout history and in many cultures, including 1930’s Europe, Morocco, India, Spanish art of the 16th-19th centuries. Psychologists stress the importance of the role of toys and play in children’s language development and intellectual skills, and this book demonstrates the recurrent theme of the transmission of cultural norms through the portrayal, presentation and use of toys. The text establishes the role of toy and play park design in eliciting particular forms of play, as well as stressing the child’s use of toys to ‘become’ more adult. It will be beneficial for courses in education, developmental psychology, communications, media studies, and toy design.

This collection of authoritative studies portrays how the A basic agencies of socialization transform the newborn human organism into a social person capable of interacting with others. Socialization differs from one society to another and within any society from one segment to another. Childhood Socialization samples some of that variation, giving the reader a glimpse of socialization in contexts other than those with which he or she is likely to be familiar. In the years since publication of the first edition of this book in 1988, childhood has become a territory open to broader sociological investigation. In this revised edition, Gerald Handel has selected and gathered new contributions that analyze the agents of socialization, including family, school, and peer group,, and explore the influences of television and gender. The balance of classical studies and more recent work reflecting changes in the family structure renews the centrality of this anthology for courses in the social psychology of children up to adolescence. The book is divided into nine parts: "Socialization, Indi-viduation, and the Self; "Historical Changes in Attitudes Toward Children"; "Families as Socialization Agents"; "Daycare and Nursery School as Socialization Agents"; "Schools as Socialization Agents"; "Peer Groups as Socialization Agents"; "Television and its Influence"; "Gender Socialization"; and "Social Stratification and Inequality in Socialization." While socialization continues on into the adolescent and adult years, childhood socialization is primary, essential in creating the human person and in shaping the identity, outlook, skills, and resources of the evolving person. Childhood Socialization is a dynamic volume that will be of continuing interest to students and scholars of family studies, sociology, psychology, and modern culture.